The Civil War in the eastern Ukraine should have surprised no one; the Ukraine's geography and demographics made it a highly regional place throughout its history. The western Ukraine was always highly nationalist which identified more with its western neighbors than with Moscow while the eastern Ukraine, including the Crimea, always included many ethnic Russians speaking mostly Russian in their daily lives. The crisis began with the Euromaiden protests in late November 2013 when then Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych reneged on his promise to sign a free trade agreement with the EU and instead, bowed to Putin's political pressure to accept Moscow's $15 billion loan and deep cuts in energy prices from Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom. Putin used threats of disruption of oil flows to the Ukraine to achieve Yanukovych's cooperation.
The Ukrainian PM appealed to populist impulses by arguing publicly that a free trade treaty with the EU would destroy the Ukraine's labor intensive industries like steel resulting in massive unemployment and economic collapse. But the majority of western Ukrainians were unconvinced; the appeal of economic relations with the EU was that the Ukraine's economy was already in chaos brought on mainly by the 2008 global financial crash. In addition, strong nationalist sentiments were further stirred by the fact that Yanukovych, a corrupt, heavy handed and wealthy oligarch, had no right to pretend to be concerned about working class interests. And so the Euromaiden protests in favor of free trade with western Europe, a kind of Occupy Movement in reverse, was more a traditional rejection of Moscow than a whole hearted embrace of free market globalization.
But the more Russia pushed its interests the more it stirred violent Ukrainian nationalism which resulted in a civil war in the eastern part. The emergence of pro-Russian separatist militias which wanted the eastern part of the Ukraine to be annexed by Russia met with fierce and often barbaric resistance from ultra-nationalist, fascist Ukrainian militias in the eastern provinces such as the Azov Brigades. The crisis has led to fascist parties like Svoboda, an avowedly anti-Russian and anti-Semitic party, taking over huge sections of the Kiev Regime and military. This is reflected in their support for all manner of fascist element like the Azov militias to fight armed Russian separatists in the east. Amnesty international has reported on atrocities committed by the Azov brigades such as beheading Russian separatists and sending their severed heads to their families in wooden boxes. One report from the UK Telegraph in August of 2014 went as follows;
"As Ukraine’s armed forces tighten the noose around pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country, the western-backed government in Kiev is throwing militia groups – some openly neo-Nazi - into the front of the battle. The Azov battalion has the most chilling reputation of all. Last week, it came to the fore as it mounted a bold attack on the rebel redoubt of Donetsk, striking deep into the suburbs of a city under siege...Kiev’s use of volunteer paramilitaries to stamp out the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, proclaimed in eastern Ukraine in March, should send a shiver down Europe’s spine. Recently formed battalions such as Donbas, Dnipro and Azov, with several thousand men under their command, are officially under the control of the interior ministry but their financing is murky, their training inadequate and their ideology often alarming. The Azov men use the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook) symbol on their banner and members of the battalion are openly white supremacists, or anti-Semites. “Personally, I’m a Nazi,” said “Phantom”, a 23-year-old former lawyer at the ceremony wearing camouflage and holding a Kalashnikov..."
An interview with a commander from the Azov battalion revealed these sentiments;
Mr Biletsky is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly. “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival,” he wrote in a recent commentary. “A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
The journalist concluded that Kiev is quite unapologetic about the use of Nazi elements who act on long standing violent racist hatred and categorically reject any compromise solutions to the crisis.
A lot of the opposition to Russia is based on historic hatred and a vicious, belligerent nationalism that is racist and intolerant of Jews, Poles, Russians and any non-Ukrainians in the Ukraine that are inevitably viewed as disloyal fifth columnists simply by virtue of their non-Ukrainian ethnicity and neutrality toward Russia.
Ukrainian nationalism has historically been extremely ugly and murderous. It began in a Cossack uprising against the far flung Polish nobility from 1648-1652 under Bogdan Chmielnicki who led pogroms which resulted over this period in the massacre of over 100,000 Jews and thousands of Poles living in the Ukraine. According to the Jewish Virtual Library; "It is impossible to determine accurately the number of victims who perished, but it undoubtedly amounted to tens of thousands; the Jewish chronicles mention 100,000 killed and 300 communities destroyed."
During the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed nearly 200,000 Jews and countless small villages or Shtetls were destroyed not all of them in the Ukraine or by Ukrainian nationalists. One scholarly source, the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence chronicles the massacres of Jews in Belorussia and the Ukraine and recounts;
"During the civil war, the Jewish populations of the Ukraine (and Belarus, to a lesser extent) were struck by the worst pogroms ever to take place in regions where the 1903-1906 pogroms had already severely harmed the Jewish populations. Approximately 150,000 Jewish victims (125,000 in the Ukraine, 25,000 in Belarus) died between 1918 and 1922. 1919 was undoubtedly the deadliest year. Pogroms were carried out by various armed units: by the White Army under General Denikin, by troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic under S. Petliura, by detachments of various warlord "Ataman" (Sokolovski, Kozyr-Zyrka, Hrigoriyv, Zelenyi), by detachments of "Greens" (insurgent farmers), and even by Red Army units (in particular the famous Konarmya, the 1st Cavalry Army under S. Budienny). In some townships of the Ukraine and Belarus different units would be simultaneously responsible for pogroms." From about 1904 until the Russian Revolution pogroms were common in the Ukraine as well taking thousands of lives and destroying property leaving many Jews impoverished and forced to flee into exile.
During the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine during WWII, a hideous pogrom took place in Lviv (Lvov in Russian and Lemburg when the town was under the Austrian Monarchy before the end of WWI). The town was in the very southeast corner of pre-WWI Poland and despite the towns being absorbed by the Ukraine after WWII, only about a fifth of the towns inhabitants were Ukrainian with the rest mostly Poles and Jews. Under Nazi occupation members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) militia murdered all but 300 of the nearly 100,000 Jewish inhabitants of the town in 1941. Another 35,000 Poles were murdered in mass violence in 1943 before the Nazis were forced to completely retreat from Soviet territory according to Patrick Cockburn of the Independent. Cockburn describes the violence in detail;
The German army captured Lviv on 30 June 1941, the Soviet NKVD secret police massacred several thousand political prisoners in the jails when they realised that the Germans could not be stopped. The next day, the pogrom started with Jews being compelled to dig up the rotting bodies of the dead prisoners. Others were ritually humiliated by being forced to clean the streets with tooth brushes or remove horse manure by putting it in their hats. "Judging by the photographs, gentiles in Lviv found the cleaners amusing," writes Professor Himka. "To some extent, the pogrom was a carnival." Women were stripped naked and beaten and hundreds of Jews were forced to crawl for miles to the prisons. Kurt Lewin, a survivor, left a detailed account of what happened to him in one prison and he described "savage beatings by both Germans and Ukrainians", said Simka. "One Ukrainian particularly carved himself into Lewin's memory. Elegantly dressed in a beautifully embroidered shirt, he beat the Jews with an ironclad cane. Strips of skin flew with every blow, sometimes an ear or an eye." When his cane broke the man chose a heavier piece of wood with which to beat a man to death. Edward Spicer, 22 at the time, recalled being caught by a group of Ukrainians near his home and taken to a nearby railway station: "First they were beating us all the way, then they pushed us down the staircase, until we were piled up one on top of another five-six high." Later, the Jews were made to lie on the ground and anybody who moved was killed with a rifle butt. Many were later taken away in trucks by the Germans to be shot. Professor Himka says the Ukrainians co-operating with the Germans and spearheading the pogrom were members of a militia formed the previous day who often had no uniform and were identifiable only by blue and yellow armbands, worn on the left arm. The Jews were later forced into a ghetto and by the time the Red Army recaptured Lviv in 1944 only 200 to 300 of those Jews were still alive."
Ukrainian nationalism is historically quite ugly. It is largely based on resentment and violent racist hate. The ranks of these nationalists are filled neo-nazis and their sympathizers. As Cockburn says we may be witnessing a horrible repeat of the past in today's tragic events. This should be taken into account by Western leaders who want to give unqualified support to Kiev nationalists who daily support and engage in massive barbarities and human rights violations in pursuit of a solution to a legitimate political issue. Non-Ukrainians in the east have a legitimate political grievance that will only be met with more violent barbarity without political pressure from the western powers that Kiev so desperately wants to engage.